When did i get like this.., p.11
When Did I Get Like This?, page 11
Warmly,
Daphne Divakaruni
Here was one bit of good news: we did not have to agonize over choosing the “right” school for Connor. He only got into one school out of nine.
That was all we needed, wasn’t it? My goal had been to get him in somewhere, and we had, and Hudson International was actually pretty good. I understood going in that these nursery schools snubbed most of their applicants. That one shouldn’t take it personally. Why was it still so devastating?
Because this application process had been the litmus test of everything I had done for Connor so far. And based on the results, I’d done a shitty job. One out of nine? Where had I gone so totally, completely wrong that eight schools could see it? This couldn’t have been Connor’s fault. Well, except the school where he bit. The rest of it was all me. With eight rejections but no explanations, I conjured up my own lengthy list of possibilities, all pointing to my evident shortcomings as a parent.
My husband saw no need for further reflection. “Let it go,” David said. “He has a spot. Everything is fine. Let it go.” And he was right, of course. That fall, Connor played with blocks three mornings a week at the Hudson International Children’s School, and even though he cried when I left every morning until Thanksgiving, he loved it. Even the pottery kiln.
I wish I could say that in the end, I learned how silly and inconsequential the whole process was. But I remained stung by the rejection, and I wondered, for a long time, how I might have done things differently. I’m still not sure there is anything I could have changed. That does not really make me feel better. While I can roll my eyes at what I had to do to get Connor a cubby in the cloakroom, I cannot say, even today, that I have ever felt my efforts were unnecessary. On that day in March, as I held those nursery school letters in my hand, my main takeaway was this bone-deep certainty: my children were all going to have disappointments in their lives. When those times came, it might be only a small comfort to understand, as I now did, that whatever it was that happened, it would be completely and absolutely Mommy’s fault.
CHAPTER TEN
A Tale of Two Mommies
Now that I am an old lady, my idea of a perfect evening no longer includes dinner in a cloth-napkin restaurant and dancing ’til two. These days, a great night for me occurs when David is out at some work dinner and my kids all go to sleep more or less on time. On such an enchanted evening, I settle eagerly into the couch with my laptop, my inbox of nearly overdue bills, a glass of oaky chardonnay, the remote control, and The Learning Channel, the cable network featuring toddlers in tiaras, women who didn’t know they were pregnant, and families notable for their improbable number of children.
What always gets me about these shows is how eerily tranquil these enormous households all seem. Every episode is set up like, “uh-oh, we’re going to take the sextuplets to the dentist, this should be interesting…” and then it’s calm and measured and totally fine. Heaven knows these mothers have all had their issues, but they are usually with travel logistics, or no-good husbands, or the lack of privacy for which they can really only blame themselves. These mothers are not tearing their hair out as their passels of children run wild. Taking care of the children seems to be the easy part, and I can’t say I am as composed, ever, as these mothers of multitudes are, always. Even if David or the babysitter or my mom is around to help—or, for that matter, all of them—my kids want “only Mommy” to cut their meat or wash their hiney or whatever; and the din of their concurrent needs being shouted above the buzz of the dishwasher I neglected to turn on that morning does get to me.
On TV at least, these families-cum–day care centers never seem as loud as my household. They never seem loud at all. And if one of the little rascals should have a difficult moment, his mother will always handle it with great reserves of patience and grace. I remember one show in which a fresh-scrubbed, Jesus-loving lad of about eight was having a tantrum. I cannot recall his exact grounds for rebellion; “I don’t want to wear long underwear under my clothes, it’s July,” he was perhaps saying. His mother knelt down to his level as he carried on, made loving eye contact with him, and said, “Jebediah. Jebediah, sweetheart, look at Mommy.” She was speaking so quietly he couldn’t hear her and cry at the same time. Jebediah stopped and gazed at his mother.
“Sweetheart,” she continued at her subsonic frequency, “why are you not doing what I am asking you to do? Because I know you know how to do it. You are a big boy.” That was all it took. Jebediah wiped away his own tears and donned his woolen union suit without further incident. Like I said, I’m a little fuzzy on the details—it might have been a hair shirt, size 4T—but it was the overall effectiveness of this mother’s disciplinary approach that struck me. Without raising her voice, indeed by lowering it, she defused her son’s tantrum quickly and peacefully.
I saw this episode at some point when Seamus’s Year of Being Completely Intractable had just begun, right before his fourth birthday. The next evening, as he raged against bedtime, though clearly exhausted, and started to kick me while his baby sister screamed for me from her crib down the hall, I tried a little tenderness. I pinned him down with my body as he screamed, madly scissoring his little legs. Then I murmured in his ear: “Sweetheart, did you know? There is a Good Seamus who lives on this shoulder, right here. And on this shoulder, over here, lives Bold Seamus.”
Here, a clarification. Whenever I misbehaved as a child, my mother would always scold me for being a “bold” girl. Never “bad” or “naughty.” I thought all mothers had “bold” in their repertoire until I had a child old enough to discipline and started getting weird looks at playgroup. I have since discovered by perusing the dictionary that “bold” is part of my ethnic heritage:
bold (adjective)
1 showing an ability to take risks; confident and courageous
2 having a strong or vivid appearance
3 (of a cliff or coast) steep or projecting
4 Irish (of a child) naughty; badly behaved
These days I seem to be the only parent at the playground who uses “bold” in the fourth sense of the word. Most mothers are more likely to apply the term to a craggy coastline than to their own children. But I like it. “Bold” gets your point across without your having to scar your kids forever with a “bad” diagnosis. When my mother called me “bold,” I knew I had to get my act together, but I didn’t think she hated me or anything. And “bold” was as severe as she ever got. If I had hot-wired a car during my teen years, my mother might have deemed me “bad,” but now I’ll never know.
During one of Seamus’s recent tantrums, he had put me in my place by calling me “a bold mommy and a bad mommy.” I had not yet stooped to that level of insult, though heaven knows it would have been an accurate assessment. But Seamus was termed “bold” several times each day, and if Seamus was surprised there were mini-hims living on his shoulders, I’m sure he was mostly shocked that one of them was “good.”
He stopped kicking his legs in the bed, his little chest heaving with suppressed sobs so he could hear what I was whispering in his ear. “The good Seamus and the bold Seamus both tell you what you should be doing. And it’s hard to know which one to listen to sometimes, isn’t it?”
“Wait. Dere are wittle me’s on my solders?” Seamus breathed, craning his neck from side to side. “Do you see dem, for weal weal wife?”
“I certainly do,” I answered.
“Why don’t I see dem?” he whispered.
“Because they like to hide in your ears,” I said, countering. His eyes grew wide.
At this point, I had drifted considerably from the original concept. It’s supposed to be an angel and a devil on your shoulders, not tiny versions of yourself, although I definitely recall a Tom and Jerry episode where Tom had two teeny gray cats on his shoulders, one wielding a pitchfork. But for something I had made up on the fly, it wasn’t bad, and Seamus was very taken with the idea. “What are dey saying?” he whispered, listening hard but hearing nothing.
“Well,” I vamped, very proud of myself, “Bold Seamus is saying, ‘Kick Mommy! Kick her again! I don’t want to go to sleep!’ and Good Seamus is saying, ‘Oh, but I sure do. I sure am tired.’”
And gosh-darn it, Seamus the Good lay down and went to sleep, and for the next several days, his tantrums ebbed nicely. He had a far-off look in his eyes as he listened intently for the next missive from his tiny conscience companions. “What is Bold Seamus saying wight now?” he’d ask. He was always more interested in what Bold Seamus was saying, and really, who wouldn’t be? But merely talking about Bold Seamus, the Lord of Misrule, had become as satisfying as any actual misbehavior. “Bold Seamus want to bweak Connor’s bwock stwucture!” Seamus would roar, and then could be calmly redirected without his actually doing it. I considered myself a parenting genius for two full weeks, until suddenly any mention of what Bold Seamus was thinking or doing was enough to summon him from the underworld for a week’s stay or longer, and the whole line of discussion had to be dropped entirely.
By a few months later, I had forgotten all about it. I was giving Connor his five weekly minutes of quality Mommy time, hanging out on the toilet seat while he took his bath. “Mommy,” Connor said, attempting to float on his back in our tub, which was quickly becoming too small for him to lie down in, “Mommy, do you remember how there are two Seamuses?”
“Oh. Sure I do, bud.”
“Well, did you know there are also two Mommies?”
“Really?” I said, smiling indulgently as I imagined what six-year-old bon mot might issue from his lips. “Who are they?”
“Well, there’s the nice Mommy, and—”
“And?”
“—and, the—other one,” he said, closing his eyes and dipping his ears below the surface of the water, giving me a moment perched on the toilet seat to take this all in.
There are two of me. One of me swings my two sons’ hands as we stroll three abreast to the corner to wait for the bus in the morning. We all have the same smile.
Then there is the other me, the one who storms into her sons’ room the next morning, saying, “How many times do I have to tell you to put your G-D shoes on we are going to MISS THE BUS!” and sees, just for a moment, their fear that one of those shoes might be winged at them.
I have never thrown shoes at my children. But I have thrown shoes at the wall. I have grabbed my boys by the scruffs of their shirts and deposited them in their Time Out chairs with more force then was perhaps necessary. I have even spanked their behinds, once for biting another kid, and a few other times for things that seemed really awful at the moment, but which can’t have been as bad as they seemed, since I can no longer recall what they even were. Most egregiously, however, I am a yeller. At least once a week, I will hear one of my children scream from the other end of the house, an unholy wail, and when I swoop in and see the truck in one son’s hand and the rapidly rising welt on the other son’s face, I will Lose My Shit. If I am not a Bad Mommy at times like this, I am certainly a very, very Bold One.
Of course, I always apologize as soon as I calm down, and give my kids a hug, and since thirty seconds later they’re playing together again, untroubled by it all, I have assumed that making proper amends at least separates me from the really rotten apples. Sitting there watching Connor hold his breath under the water, though, I realized that saying you’re sorry for having been a jerk is not really as powerful an example for your children as not having been a jerk in the first place.
At least Connor had said there were two of me, which, loosely interpreted, meant I was sometimes not horrible to be around. And as my friend Missy pointed out, I couldn’t be that scary a mommy if Connor felt okay bringing it up in the first place. But he had brought it up. I did not want my children to grow up being scared of me, even once in a while, so I needed to make some changes. I bought an armful of books with jaunty, self-actualizing titles like Parenting in Peace-s and Keep It Down! Most of these books spent the first two-thirds of their pages telling me how Really Important it was that I stop yelling at my children. This seemed like a colossal waste of ink; if I thought yelling at my kids was fine and dandy, sirs, I would not be reading your books. Plus, I can only read three pages a night before falling asleep, so couldn’t they just get to the point already? After a few weeks of these books on my bedside table, I had at least assimilated their overall message: Children look to parents for consistency. If you show them that you can remain in control, so, eventually, will they.
Well, if all I had to do to have well-behaved children was to be well-behaved myself, I was ready to begin. When the boys came to blows at the breakfast table the next morning over who liked Cinnamon Life more, I tried one of my new Mellow Mommy lines on them:
“Whoa, sounds like both of you are a little steamed.”
And I said it in this totally relaxed, quiet voice, too. Wasn’t that good? I was reflecting their feelings without judgment. The only problem was, neither of them could hear me, because Connor was screeching so loudly the veins in his neck were standing out: “I! Like! Cinnamon! Life! The! MOST!”
“That sure is an angry message,” I said, still trying what the books had assured me would work. “Seamus, would you like to respond?” At which point, Bold Seamus apparently whispered in Real Seamus’s ear that he should dump his beloved Cinnamon Life on his brother’s head.
I ask you: would this not have been too much, even for the SuperNanny? I went apoplectic on the two of them: “Why can’t you just get along for five minutes!” But as I rounded the corner from that tirade into the “Food is not for wasting” harangue, I stopped short. The two boys, instead of looking at me, or at least looking down in abject shame, were regarding each other across the kitchen table, Connor with Cinnamon Life still in his hair. They were both smirking.
It was one thing to go banshee on my children and at least feel that it was, as a medium-to-last resort, successful behavioral modification. But if they could snicker at my yelling? If they had gotten used to it? That was even more reason to stop. If I were forced to defend myself under subpoena, like Jack Bauer on 24, I would be forced to admit that not only was I a Bold Mommy, but that my “enhanced compliance techniques” hadn’t even worked.
I stepped up my non-yelling efforts. I gave yelling up for Lent instead of caffeine. I was not entirely successful in abstaining, but when I did get the urge to yell for those forty days, I thought: Well, I hope this hollering will really be worth it, since you are breaking a promise to your family that you made before God. Usually, by the time I had finished thinking all that, the kids would be on to something else anyhow.
There are certainly times when a good lung workout is called for—say, when Seamus is about to scooter into the path of a FedEx truck—but that is all the more reason to save the screaming for when I really need it. The hardest part is recognizing, in the moment, that my kid having the effrontery to whine “I didn’t say I wanted peanut butter with grape jelly” is not an instance where utterly losing my mind is really warranted. It is a moment to listen to Good Mommy, to do the exact opposite of what my baser instincts are telling me: lower my voice instead of raise it, model flexibility rather than impatience, embrace my child rather than my frustration. I can say that I yell less than I used to. But I still have a long way to go.
One day last month, my friend Cece gave Connor and me a ride home from his school after pickup. Her two boys, strapped a little too closely together in their booster seats (how else was she supposed to fit their little sister’s humongo Britax Roundabout in the same row?) started screeching at each other about who was the rightful owner of a LEGO piece so small it was barely visible to the naked eye. The two of them screamed for the rest of the ride at a level distressing enough to trigger embolism. I looked over at Cece to gauge her reaction. Gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles, she drove the whole way to our house, staring straight ahead, without making any attempt to stop their caterwauling. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t going ballistic. How could she keep it together and drive, for Pete’s sake, with that going on in the backseat? I figured I would never be as patient as Cece.
Then, that evening, an e-mail. “Sorry about today,” Cece wrote. “As soon as you got out of the car, I became the most horrible mother in the world. I’ve never screamed at the kids like that. I just didn’t want you and Connor to see it.” Little did she know how much I wished I had. It was quite comforting to imagine my calm and centered friend with her eyes bulging from their sockets. Perhaps there are two mommies in all of us, even in TLC’s selfless, home-schooling mother of nineteen, and it will certainly make for compelling viewing if we ever get to witness her dark side.
As for me, I cannot deny that Bold Mommy is there on my shoulder, just waiting for her chance to reemerge. My children know it too. When Bold Mommy tells me to fly off the handle, and I struggle mightily to keep it together, I still see a flicker of worry in Connor’s eyes: is Mommy about to be scary? Usually, that is all the reminder I need to stay on the Good Mommy side; a mother should, above all, make her children feel safe. Perhaps one day, if Bold Mommy doesn’t show her face for a long, long time, my kids might forget about her. Until then, the best I can do is show them that when Bold Mommy whispers in my ear, I hear her. But I choose not to listen.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Big P
It was 6:45 P.M., and Connor the Kindergartner had started his nightly refrain:
CONNOR: I don’t want to take a bath.
ME: You have to take a bath.
CONNOR: I took one last night!
ME: No, you didn’t.
Connor sighed heavily as he walked down the hallway, off to the gallows.
CONNOR: Can it be a short bath, at least?
